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Reflecting on his experiences of leading teams through some of the world’s wildest places, expedition leader and adventurer Oli France discusses the lessons he has learned about resilience, risk, and leadership - and how they can apply to anyone working in a high-pressure environment.
Oli France is an adventurer and expedition leader who specialises in assembling, leading and motivating teams in some of the world’s harshest environments - including deserts, jungles, mountains and war-torn regions across 75 countries. In these environments, he has faced off against spies and interrogators, avalanches and earthquakes, as well as severe dehydration and meningitis.
He is currently working on the world-first Ultimate Seven project, where he aims to become the first person to journey entirely by human power from the lowest point in each continent to the highest. Most recently, this took him from Death Valley to Denali in North America, a 64 day and 3,588 mile expedition that saw him cycling unsupported through remote areas of the West Coast, and facing the elements as he climbed Denali with his team.
His other expeditions have included a solo winter 8,000-mile mountaineering journey from Hong Kong to Istanbul, a 400-mile solo winter crossing of Lake Baikal, Siberia, a 1,634-mile human-powered journey from Lac Assal, Djibouti, to Kilimanjaro, plus climbing the highest mountain in Iraq, volcanoes in the Congo, and other notable summits across dozens of countries.
From his experiences, Oli reflects on what it takes to lead - and be a part of - a high performing team, discussing the importance of trust, communication and clarity, as well as vulnerability in these situations. He considers how to build resilience, and how we spend so long thinking about our fears that, by the time we face them, the reality is much less bad than we thought it would be - as well as how marginal gains can make all the difference when in a high-pressure environment.
